Weekly Head Voices #78: Aeroimpressed.

Up in the North, temperatures were in the mid to high twenties every day (yes, it’s the middle of Winter, and that’s how they roll in the North). Back home we had to deal with mid to high tens (sometimes in the twenties!), and then, because the houses are not built for winter and sport similar temperatures inside and outside, you resort to making a fire in yer office, because that’s how we roll!

My office is on fire! Note the interrogation lamp.

(don’t worry, our friendly electrician managed to get the underfloor heating working and now I don’t have to make fire in the office anymore. you can send donations towards my electricity bill via paypal.)

On Tuesday evening (after the fire), I decided to go to my first MeetUp. Although my main goal was to meet fellow software developers and entrepreneurs from my neighbourhood, I had a super enjoyable evening meeting said people, and learning about Construct 2 (the topic of the presentation). Now while I’m not into gaming at all, this did lead to evenings of reading about the various mobile game development libraries; there’s a whole universe of interesting cross-platform code out there! My search finally ended with Moai SDK, an open source C++ engine with Lua bindings (Lua is awesome, before Moai I integrated it with my secret hobby project; for 200kBytes you get a whole super fast dynamic language in your C++ application!) that can be used to write 2D games for all of the desktop platforms, as well as for iOS and for Android.

I have too many hobby projects going, but the idea of writing a mobile app that’s actually enjoyed by a few people does sound like fun. (I do have an embarrassing app in the store. It’s been downloaded more than 10000 times, and many of the reviewers (more than 200 at last count) have turned superlative reviewing for the useless app into an art. (Writing over the top funny reviews is a thing, but you knew that.))

It was awesome seeing Colbert interviewing Vint Cerf, co-father of the internet:

The bit at 17m50 in the full episode, or at 20 seconds into the part 2 video hosted on the Colbert site, where Colbert asks Cerf about his resemblance to The Architect (of The Matrix) is priceless.

Vint Cerf on the left, The Architect on the right. (I had to watch this via US VPN due to geographic rights restrictions. Kind of ironic!)

Oh, it turns out that Al Gore did help to get NSFnet funded by the NSF, and so the running joke about him giving the world internet has a kernel of truth according to the gracious Vint Cerf. Here’s a cookie to feed to your trivia OCD: Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn started working on what would become the internet in 1973, and they switched it on in 1983.

GOU#1, all of 8 years old, is independently WhatsApping with her grandparents, from her own telephone. I find it really awesome that she’s making these connections with her extended family. I also find it awesome that she comes up with these kinds of constructions when we’re not in the mood to build a real fire:

Augmented reality, GOU#1 style.

(Now she just has to let me teach her to code.)

(I thought that this was going to be a really short post, but this time my notes had other ideas. We’re almost done…)

Sitting on the shelf above all of the lovely coffee beans was a newly delivered consignment of Aeropress coffee makers. During a previous visit, I had managed to resist taking one, but this thing was now singing to the very warp core of my inner coffee nerd.

I could not resist its call anymore.

Giant coffee injection. Air-tight seal, column of air pushes water through coffee in 30 seconds. I haz it.

I can now report that with freshly ground Bugisu Arabica coffee, the liquid black gold emerging from this wondrous device is indeed some of the purest and best coffee that I’ve ever had. If you’re into coffee, get one of these. You can thank me at the next hipster meetup.

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This is my personal blog. You will find posts on science, software, general nerdery, privacy and backyard philosophy. It also hosts the Weekly Head Voices, a weekly (mostly not) personal diary, in which I usually also try to include something entertaining and/or educational.